This self-serving rationalization was tested by the rest of the day’s patients, almost all of whom turned out to be heartbreakers. Some days were like that; the intensity never let up. It began after Hangnail—whom Compton had now christened Vengeful Hangnail—with a sixty-four-year-old woman presenting with headache. Rapid testing for ART in the screening area outside had been negative, and her story didn’t sound infectious anyway, an assumption that was even likelier to be true when she coded in the CT scanner with a massive aneurysmal bleed. At the precise moment Compton was trying to revive her, three gunshot wounds to the abdomen arrived, all of them curly-haired teenaged girls and all of them near death, and, as it turned out, all of whom had been shot by their father. Apparently, according to EMS, he reported he’d also tried to shoot himself but “missed.”

Next to the ravaged teenaged sisters was a room with a middle-aged diabetic man on the verge of death from overwhelming sepsis, whom Compton knew and liked because she’d seen him perform his stand-up comedy routine at a bar near her neighborhood. Another ambulance rolled up with a pedestrian-versus-car suffering a Le Fort III fracture—a hideous injury that basically split the face in two—and bilateral femur fractures; yet another ambulance delivered a postpartum college student who appeared to be having an eclamptic seizure. And that was just the ambulances; the waiting room, stuffed with the walking wounded, was also a seething hell.

At first, Compton kept her cool, focused on doing the things that had to be done. But her own breathing grew irregular as the carnage piled up. She tried—she tried so hard—not to make the obvious comparison. This was all normal ER stuff, even if it was happening in an unfortunate spate. It wasn’t a return to those endless days and nights of pandemic patients. It wasn’t a return to seeing nurses work themselves to a literal death. It wasn’t a return to futility, helplessness, confusion, and inadequacy. It wasn’t a return to blue-lipped people begging her to contact their husbands, their wives, their parents, their children, relying on her to remember to convey their last mortal message to their loved ones in case they died. She wasn’t weeping, holding the hand of a twenty-year-old Asian man drawing his last breath eight thousand miles away from his mother, her tears pooling behind her face shield where she could not wipe them away. It wasn’t an eternal wave of grief.

It was just a normal bad day in the ER.

—